Rural Digital Opportunity Fund

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed many hard truths, and one of them is our nation’s digital divide. In Illinois, the Office of Broadband, through its Connect Illinois broadband program, is working to ensure broadband use by everyone in the state.

I work with communities all of the time that want to know if they are unserved or underserved by broadband. I've started to tell them to toss away those two terms, which is not a good way to think about broadband today. The main reason to scrap these terms is that they convey the idea that 25/3 Mbps broadband ought to be an acceptable target speed for building new broadband. Urban America has moved far beyond the kinds of broadband speeds that are being discussed as acceptable for rural broadband. Cable companies now have minimum speeds that vary between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps.

The most likely scenario for success is the addition of broadband service to an existing electric or telephone cooperative’s portfolio. In this case, an entity with experience in running a customer-facing operation and network for decades simply expands its service. The cooperatives are already serving mostly rural customers and do not crowd out for-profit cable and telecom providers. The Federal Communications Commission has recognized this and has explicitly included electric cooperatives in the Connect America Fund II initiative.

Frontier has filed a waiver request with the Federal Communications Commission, the resolution of which could impact the company’s ability to participate in Phase 1 of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, scheduled to begin in Oct. Frontier entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April.

Charter plans to participate in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction. Depending how successful the company is in the auction, the build-out could involve multiple millions of locations and an investment of multiple billions of dollars, Charter said.  Major cable companies-turned-broadband providers such as Charter traditionally have not participated in government funding programs.

The introduction of the Expanding Opportunities for Broadband Deployment Act by Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-NC) is an important development in the vital Universal Service Fund (USF) program. At a time when all trends point toward reduced regulation as the key to expanding broadband access to more consumers, especially those living in the more costly and remote service areas, this needed legislative reform would eliminate the outdated requirement of an Eligible Telecommunications Carrier (ETC) designation for broadband providers seeking USF grant money.

 House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Mike Doyle (D-PA) said that a lot of broadband internet access service providers, "for whatever reason," claim they have service where they don't, something he said everyone knows "has been going on for years." He said that since Democrats and Republicans agree that broadband maps aren't good, the Federal Communications Commission would just be throwing $20 million out the window by starting to give out most of the Rural Development Opportunities Fund (RDOF) subsidy money.

We’ve been working to fill [the tricky gap between urban and rural broadband access] for more than two decades. Around 95 percent of the US population today has access to broadband of at least 25 megabits per second. 99 percent of non-rural households do, and 98 percent of non-rural households enjoy access to 100 megabits-per-second service.

Senators Rob Portman (R-OH), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Mike Braun (R-IN), Michael Bennet (D-CO), and Doug Jones (D-AL) introduced the Rural Broadband Acceleration Act, bipartisan legislation that will bolster efforts to expand access to rural broadband nationwide and speed up the distribution of the Federal Communication Commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). The RDOF will allocate $20.4 billion to building rural broadband in two phases and this legislation will ensure that some of that money is distributed to communities much faster than the original deadline.

On June 2, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS) wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai about the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).